Professor Zhiwei Xu’s team from Ocean College, Zhejiang University achieved innovative results in the field of low-orbit satellite broadband communication chip design. The related paper was published in February 2021 by ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference), the highest level conference in the field of integrated circuit.. The first author of the paper is a Ph.D. student Min Li under the supervision of Professor Xu. This is the first time that Zhejiang University published a paper on ISSCC as the first affiliation.

Focusing on overcoming the bottlenecks in the field of marine broadband satellite communications, a team led by Professor Zhiwei Xu and Associate Professor Chunyi Song from Institute of Marine Electronics and Intelligent Systems is actively conducting research on low-orbit satellite broadband communications from chips to terminal systems and has made important progress. “We successfully taped out the receiver chip in May last year and the transmitter in November last year. At the same time, we cooperated with relevant organizations in Shanghai to develop a communication terminal system suitable for the future space Internet, especially a shipboard terminal system.” Chunyi Song said. “Four papers completed by the team based on relevant results were published earlier last year in IEEE IMS, IEEE RFIC, and IEEE ASSCC. They are internationally renowned academic conferences in the fields of microwave and integrated circuits.”

It is known that Professor Xu’s team also successfully taped out a millimeter-wave radar chip in May last year. They have successfully designed radar chips suitable for target detection at different distances, and environmental perception at multiple frequency bands, They also designed chips suitable for marine satellite broadband communications, etc. The team enabled 8 beams on a single chip. This chip is a radio frequency phased-array receiver front end that supports the largest number of beams and the lowest power consumption per element per beam in the world.

ISSCC, started in 1953, is usually the first place where the state-of-the-art works of solid-state circuit were published. Because ISSCC has received a great deal of attention in the international academic and industrial society, it is also called the Olympics of Integrated Circuit. ISSCC selects about 200 papers every year, including a considerable number of papers from top companies in the field of integrated circuits. Scholars from mainland China published their first paper in 2005, and the total number of papers published so far is less than 70.

（Zhiwen Song and Mengzhu Liao）